Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

721–730 of 970 posts

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#721

Post by whateveracct »

oska wrote: post #709
samfriedman wrote: post #159

The title should be updated, as T_D was just one of a large number of subs banned today; even then, it has been largely irrelevant since the admins' earlier decision to quarantine it and impose other restrictions. Other larger banned subs include /r/GenderCritical (anti-Trans) and /r/ConsumeProduct which was ostensibly for criticism of consumerism and product promotion, but hid a large strain of antisemitism below th…

> /r/GenderCritical (anti-Trans) This is not a fair portrayal of that sub. Reddit can do what it likes about banning political subs but the banning of r/gendercritical is quite concerning, in my opinion.

Sadly current discourse does equate those two things. Being gender critical ("gender is fake and a tool of patriarchal oppression") is equated with erasing & attacking trans people - politically these two parties do seem to be at odds.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#722

Post by three_seagrass »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #463
three_seagrass wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything decentralized will create a vacuum of power to be filled by rational actors. Kind of like how Bitcoin is decentralized but controlled by a handful of miners on China.

Is email controlled by Google and Yahoo?

e-mail is a communication standard, not a network/system.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#723

Post by belorn »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #708
new2628 wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, only by Google.

Email is not controlled by Google. There is myriad of other big players in the field, plus you can get an email server on your own domain up and running in ~ 5 minutes

Email is controlled through gmail in the same way as webdesign is controlled by SEO directed towards google search. People need to access the users on the google platform, and google sets the terms for that.

That is, if you want your email to work you got to play by the rules dictated by google or a very large portion of all email will go away into a black hole.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#724

Post by SmokeyHamster »

ve55 wrote: post #7

Worth taking note that in today's climate, you really cannot win when you are in a position to moderate important things that a lot of people use. There is constantly tremendous pressure on you to perform opposing actions, and even making no decision at all will cause you significant mental stress and harassment, regardles of what the issue is. You have to pick who you want to cave to, and to what extent, and no matt…

>Worth taking note that in today's climate, you really cannot win when you are in a position to moderate important things that a lot of people use.

You kind of can, though. Sure, group X hates group Y and wants the admins to ban them. Group Y hates group X and wants the admins to ban them. The smart play would have been to be neutral and set out an explicit set of rules everyone has to follow.

Reddit instead did it the worst possible way imaginable. They laid out no clear rules, banned thousands of subs for vague "hate" reasons that you can't define, much less verify, and drastically reduced the scale and appeal of their site.

If you think group X will now be happy and stop complaining now that group Y has been banned, I think that's naive. The admins will still be pressured, but the goalposts will just be moved to ever more extremes until Reddit's such a niche echo-chamber that it appeals to too few people to remain financially viable.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#725

Post by dmoy »

basch wrote: post #683
ngold wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gotta respect the iron fist of /r/askhistorians. Probably the best sub on reddit.

The iron fist is a double edged sword in some senses. Although reddit acted as a free speech haven for a long time, it was only overall, and not ever in major specific communities. True free speech is valued because it fosters debate, and allows bad speech to be rebutted by more speech. A marketplace of ideas, and maybe more importantly, the counterspeech doctrine, are incredibly important principals in justifying th…

> True free speech is valued because it fosters debate, and allows bad speech to be rebutted by more speech

Sure, but in practice this is what true free speech on reddit for a large sub looks like before moderation

* 3 knee jerk replies

* 10 pieces of spam asking you to buy their bit/altcoin or click on their affiliate links

* 5 people who are hurling vile insults at you for whatever reason

* 8 more people who are hurling vile insults at each other, and just happen to be in your comment chain for some reason

* 1 reasonable, well thought out response

* 2 people who are lost and looking for a different sub

* 1 person replying half a year later after everyone's gone

Something in that ratio

With no moderation at all, you're lost in a sea of spam, scams, and insults. And because of the extremely poor SNR, your reasonable replies dry up and just leave.

I agree not everyone has to go the r/askhistorians route of completely iron fist, but you can't actually run a communication forum with millions or tens of millions of subscribers without a lot of automated and manual moderation. True free speech ends up being no speech because everyone got scammed or insulted and just decides to leave to go somewhere smaller. (edit: trying to untangle my confusing sentence)

It might work for smaller communities. It does not scale.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#726

Post by SauciestGNU »

scruple wrote: post #551
throwaway0xb wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/r/cumtown was Chapo adjacent and also got the axe. Part of the dirtbag left or whatever they go by now.

Yet r/stupidpol has (so far) managed to survive, which was the original Chapo Trap House podcast subreddit. edit/ There are quite a few actually disgusting subs that have managed to evade this ban, in addition to a few which I kind of expected to see banned that survived. There are also quite a few which are basically worse versions of a subreddit that was in the banwave which leads me to conclude that the Reddit adm…

/r/stupidpol should absolutely be banned if they're banning subreddits. It's everything bad that people thought the Chapo subreddit was, plus a ton of bigotry and genocide apologia.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#727

Post by SmokeyHamster »

blisseyGo wrote: post #525

From Reddit: https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/rules-reporting/acc... > Marginalized or vulnerable groups include, but are not limited to, groups based on their actual and perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, immigration status, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy, or disability. These include victims of a major violent event and their families. > While the rule on ha…

>the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority

Wow. Like, holy shit wow. So racism and hate is ok with Reddit but only as long as it's directed at "the majority"?

What the hell is the "majority"? I'm white. Yet I live in a city where blacks are the majority. Am I still the majority, meaning it's ok to harass me and send me hateful racist insults on Reddit, or would Reddit grant me honorary minority status? This is legit sickening.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#728

Post by ppf »

blisseyGo wrote: post #525

From Reddit: https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/rules-reporting/acc... > Marginalized or vulnerable groups include, but are not limited to, groups based on their actual and perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, immigration status, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy, or disability. These include victims of a major violent event and their families. > While the rule on ha…

Reddit just boarded the one-way express to crazy town. How can that policy possibly be enforced? Even if they do decide on some workable definition of what "majority groups" are, and how to prove which group you are in, I can't figure out what "actual and perceived race" means. So if someone makes an offensive comment to me because they think I am of a certain race, but it turns out I am not, it's still racism?

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#729

Post by sosodev »

_1qd4 wrote: post #307
samfriedman wrote: post #159

The title should be updated, as T_D was just one of a large number of subs banned today; even then, it has been largely irrelevant since the admins' earlier decision to quarantine it and impose other restrictions. Other larger banned subs include /r/GenderCritical (anti-Trans) and /r/ConsumeProduct which was ostensibly for criticism of consumerism and product promotion, but hid a large strain of antisemitism below th…

/r/ConsumeProduct was antisemtic? I never saw that in the posts of theirs that made the front page. It was always memes about over-consumption, they might make fun of disposable make-up wipes for example ("And when you're done, just throw it away!" cue gallery yelling in a robotic voice: CONSUME PRODUCT ). Genuinely curious what the link to antisemitism is. Is the thought that consumerism = big business, and big busi…

That’s the problem. The subreddit seemed innocent at first glance but was particularly awful upon closer inspection.

Re: Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse

#730

Post by Natanael_L »

duxup wrote: post #86
ve55 wrote: post #7

Worth taking note that in today's climate, you really cannot win when you are in a position to moderate important things that a lot of people use. There is constantly tremendous pressure on you to perform opposing actions, and even making no decision at all will cause you significant mental stress and harassment, regardles of what the issue is. You have to pick who you want to cave to, and to what extent, and no matt…

Would something decentralized help? I don't think people want that. The_Donald involved a lot of spreading their message / fake news sites / spamming across other subs and etc. Do people want to be on a platform where other folks on the same platform are targeting their community with dishonest and often bigoted content? I'm also not sure how much The_Donald was as a community. The sheer volume of users at its height…

How's this different from email? Management of server reputation, spam filters, etc.

One and gone spam servers are frequent and are dealt with through putting low trust in new servers and using heuristics to flag behavior that look abusive.

Post reply on HN